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YIVO digitizes writer Chaim Grade’s archive, a Yiddish treasure with a soap opera backstory
(JTA) — Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.
A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.
As Max explains in his 2008 memoir, “From Schlub to Stud,” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: Because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers — Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982 — a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure.
Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013, Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s W. 16th Street.
This week YIVO and the NLI will announce the completion of the digitization of “The Papers of Chaim Grade and Inna Hecker Grade,” making the entire archive publicly accessible online. When the folks at YIVO invited me to come and look at the Grade collection, I knew I had to invite Max, not just because of his connection to Inna Grade but because he has become a critically acclaimed novelist in his own right: His 2020 novel “The Lost Shtetl,” which imagines a Jewish village in Poland that has somehow escaped the Holocaust, is in many ways an homage to the Yiddish literary tradition.
We met on Thursday with the YIVO staff, who were tickled by the T-shirt Max was wearing, which had a picture of Chaim Grade and the phrase “Grade is my homeboy.” (Max said his wife bought it for him, although neither could imagine the market for such a shirt.)
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, and novelist Max Gross discuss a thick file containing news clippings relating to the late Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade at YIVO’s Manhattan offices, Feb. 2, 2023. (New York Jewish Week)
The Grade papers — manuscripts, photographs, correspondence, lectures, speeches, essays — are stored in folders in gray boxes, whose neatness belies the years of effort that went into putting them in order. Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, described for us the Grades’ apartment, which he visited shortly after Inna’s death.
“It was like a combination of my grandmother’s apartment and a writer’s home,” he said. “Everything was books, books to the ceiling. You open a drawer in the kitchen where you think there’ll be knives and forks, there are books, there are manuscripts. You open the cabinet in the bathroom, there are more manuscripts and books and books…. But the thing I remember most is that at the top of a shelf there was that much dust.” He held his fingers about two inches apart.
Inna Grade was Chaim Grade’s second wife. The writer was born in Vilna (now in Lithuania) in 1910. He was able to flee east during the Nazi occupation, leaving behind his mother and his first wife under the assumption that the Germans would only target adult men. It was a tragic miscalculation, and their deaths would haunt Grade the rest of his life. Inna Hecker was born in Ukraine in 1925, and met Grade in Moscow during the war. Married in 1945, they immigrated to the United States in 1948.
Chaim Grade had already established a reputation as a poet, playwright and prose stylist before the war; English translations of his novels “The Agunah” and “The Yeshiva” and serial publication of his novels in the Yiddish press brought him recognition in America for what the Yiddish scholar Ruth Wisse calls a “Dostoyevskian talent to animate in fiction the destroyed Talmudic civilization of Europe.” Columbia University professor Jeremy Dauber, in a YIVO release, says that Grade was possessed “by the spirit of the yeshiva world he’d left behind; then possessed by the spirits and memories of those who’d been murdered by the Nazis.”
Stefanie Halpern, director of the YIVO archives, showed us the physical evidence of that possession: Grade’s notebooks, in which he wrote down ideas and inspiration in a careful Yiddish script; manuscripts for at least two unpublished dramatic works, “The Dead Can’t Rise Up” and “Hurban” (“Sacrifice”); a photograph of Grade standing amidst the ruins of Vilna during his only visit after the war; pictures of the Bronx apartment taken when the couple was still alive, book-filled but still tidy.
Halpern also showed us the Yiddish typewriter recovered from the apartment, with what is believed to be the last page he worked on still rolled in its platen.
Chaim Grade’s typewriter, preserved in the condition it was found when the Yiddish author died in 1982, contains what are apparently the last lines he ever wrote. (New York Jewish Week)
The archivists are also careful to give Inna her due. After arriving in America she studied literature and received a master’s degree from Columbia, and often translated her husband’s work. Thanks to her, hundreds of clippings of Grade’s work and articles about him have survived.
Her correspondence reflects the lengths she went to protect her husband’s legacy during and after his lifetime, including a bizarre and lengthy letter to the Vatican complaining about Singer. “She was a brilliant and creative person, devoted in a way only a widow can be,” said Brent. “And perhaps devoted to a maddening extent.”
If all that sounds like the stuff of Jewish fiction, it is: In 1969, Cynthia Ozick wrote a novella called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America,” about Yiddish writers very much like Grade consumed with envy for a writer very much like Singer. “They hated him for the amazing thing that had happened to him — his fame — but this they never referred to,” wrote Ozick. “Instead they discussed his style: his Yiddish was impure, his sentences lacked grace and sweep, his paragraph transitions were amateur, vile.”
Halpern showed us a mailgram from Inna to the Forward that makes it clear that she and her husband read and hated the story. In it she describes Ozick as “no less grotesque than evil.”
For all of the gothic Yiddish aspects of its retrieval, “this is probably the single most important literary acquisition in YIVO’s postwar history,” Brent said of the archive. He described publishing projects already underway with Schocken Books and other publishers that will draw on the material.
Max and I discussed what it felt like to see what had become “a bit of a joke” around the Forward office placed at the center of an epic exercise in literary preservation. Max was struck by the way Inna’s personality came through in the papers. “This was her,” he said. “Her obsession, her struggle, all these things. It was definitely remarkable to see that.”
I recalled overhearing his conversations with Inna, and how her behavior could seem funny and exasperating, but also admirable and more than a little sad — in that her devotion to her husband’s reputation may also have prevented scholars from doing the work that would have made him better known.
“Exactly, but that’s one of the reasons why you get into Yiddish literature, because all of these things are true at the same time,” said Max. “Those kinds of scores, rivalries, feuds within Yiddish literature is what is so great about it. It is great to see that somebody really cared and that literature was taken so seriously. And the pettiness was something you couldn’t quite divest from the rest of it.”
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Was Khamenei Hit? Satellite Images Show Heavy Damage at His Compound
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks in a televised message, after the ceasefire between Iran and Israel, in Tehran, Iran, June 26, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – Satellite images published Saturday by The New York Times show heavy damage at the Tehran residence of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, with plumes of black smoke and multiple buildings destroyed or partially collapsed.
The images, captured by Airbus satellites, indicate that facilities used to host senior Iranian officials were among the structures hit.
Israeli sources said the strikes were carried out as part of Operation “Roaring Lion,” targeting senior commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Among those named was General Mohammad Pakpour, the current commander of the Guard forces, who assumed the role after his predecessor Hossein Salami was killed in an earlier operation. The sources added that Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, and former council secretary Ali Larijani were also potential targets.
In light of the scale of the destruction, Israeli officials are assessing multiple scenarios, including the possibility that Khamenei himself may have been at risk during the strikes. Iranian authorities have so far denied that Khamenei, the president, or other senior officials were injured.
Preliminary assessments suggest the strikes may have significantly disrupted the Revolutionary Guard’s strategic command capabilities, delivering a direct blow to its senior leadership structure. Officials in Israel and the United States are continuing to monitor developments closely as they await confirmation on the status of the Iranian figures believed to have been targeted.
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US Strikes on Iran Spark Travel Chaos as Airlines Cancel Flights
An Iranian flag flutters, as Israel and the US launched strikes on Iran, in Tehran, Iran, February 28, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Airlines suspended flights across the Middle East on Saturday, including to and from the world’s busiest travel hub Dubai, after the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran.
Flight maps showed airspace over Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Israel and Bahrain virtually empty after the strikes began, and Iran retaliated with missiles. Blasts were reported in Qatar, home to the biggest US military base in the region, as well as in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, key east-west transit hubs.
“You have crews, planes and passengers stranded all over the world. It’s a massive logistical nightmare,” a Gulf airline source said.
Dubai Airports suspended all flights at Dubai International and at Al Maktoum International until further notice, urging passengers not to travel. Emirates and flydubai temporarily halted operations, while Etihad suspended all departures from Abu Dhabi until 1000 GMT on Sunday.
PASSENGERS STRANDED ACROSS EUROPE
Students traveling from Paris to Dubai said their college trip was abandoned. “We still have some students that went there earlier and they’re stuck in Dubai and we don’t know when they’ll be able to come back,” said Benjamin Gnatek.
At Charles de Gaulle airport, Thai-bound traveler Roman Simon said his onward flight via Doha was cancelled. “Now, we’re trying to find a solution to still make our trip to Thailand,” he told Reuters.
At Doha’s Hamad International Airport, gates were nearly empty as stranded passengers queued to make hotel arrangements, a Reuters witness said.
As countries in the region closed their airspace, aircraft were forced to divert around Larnaca, Jeddah, Cairo and Riyadh. Flightradar24 briefly went down due to surging demand.
AIRSPACE COULD BE CLOSED FOR ‘SOME TIME’
The escalation dimmed hopes for progress on Tehran’s nuclear dispute with the West and reignited conflict after weeks of U.S. military buildup. Middle Eastern airports, among the world’s busiest transit hubs, warned of prolonged disruption.
“Passengers and airlines can expect airspace to be shut for quite some time,” said Eric Schouten, head of aviation security advisory Dyami.
Airlines canceled on Saturday about half of their flights to Qatar and Israel and about 28 percent of their flights to Kuwait, after the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran, according to preliminary Cirium data.
That number seems likely to rise. In total, about 24% of flights to the Middle East were cancelled, the data showed.
The region has become more important for global aviation since the Russia-Ukraine war forced airlines to avoid both countries’ airspace.
Conflict zones add to operational risks, raising fears of accidental shoot‑downs and lengthening routes, which increases fuel costs.
BRITISH AIRWAYS, LUFTHANSA, CATHAY SUSPEND FLIGHTS
The European Union’s aviation regulator EASA on Saturday recommended its airlines stay out of the airspace affected by the ongoing military intervention.
British Airways, owned by IAG, said it had canceled flights to Tel Aviv and Bahrain until March 3, as well as Saturday’s flights to Amman.
The Russian Ministry of Transport said on Saturday that Russian air carriers had suspended flights to Iran and Israel.
Germany’s Lufthansa said it was suspending flights to and from Dubai on Saturday and Sunday and halting the Tel Aviv, Beirut and Oman routes until March 7.
Air France and Iberia also cancelled flights to Tel Aviv and Beirut, while Wizz Air suspended flights to Israel, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Amman.
India put carriers on alert as Air India and IndiGo suspended services.
Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific Airways suspended operations in the region, affecting passenger flights to and from Dubai and Riyadh, as well as freighter services operating through Al Maktoum airport in Dubai.
REGIONAL CARRIERS AFFECTED
Qatar Airways and Kuwait Airways temporarily suspended flights, while Turkish Airlines also cancelled flights to several Middle Eastern destinations.
Kuwait’s aviation authority said it was halting all flights to Iran until further notice, according to the state news agency, while Oman Air said it had suspended all flights to Baghdad due to the regional developments.
KLM, the Dutch arm of Air France-KLM, has brought forward the suspension of its Amsterdam–Tel Aviv service, cancelling the flight scheduled for Saturday after strikes in Iran, a spokesperson said.
The airline had announced on Wednesday that flights would be halted from Sunday, March 1. Only one flight to Tel Aviv had been scheduled for Saturday.
Virgin Atlantic said it had decided to temporarily avoid Iraqi airspace, resulting in some re-routing of its flights.
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US-Israeli Attack Triggers Fear and Panic in Iran
Buildings stand, after Israel and the US launched strikes on Iran, in Tehran, Iran, February 28, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iranians fled cities in search of safety, and long queues formed at fuel stations as an attack on Iran by the United States and Israel spread fear and panic throughout the country.
When the strikes began on Saturday morning, explosions rocked Tehran and columns of smoke rose into the sky, shaking the city at the start of the Iranian working week.
Residents reached by phone described scenes of chaos and alarm as they rushed to collect their children from school or made preparations to leave home for now.
“We are going to our hometown in Yazd, Tehran is not safe anymore. They said roads are safe, but I am worried,” said Gholamreza, a Tehran shopkeeper and father of two. “I am leaving everything behind in Tehran.”
It marks the latest upheaval for Iranians weeks after thousands of people were killed in a government crackdown on nationwide unrest, and comes just eight months after last year’s 12-day war with Israel, during which the United States bombed Iranian nuclear sites.
Iran’s top security body said it expected attacks to continue on Tehran and some other cities, and urged people to “travel to other cities where possible so that you may remain safe from the harm of these two regimes’ acts of aggression.” Schools and universities would be closed until further notice.
“We are scared, we are terrified. My children are shaking, we have nowhere to go, we will die here,” said Minou, a 32-year-old mother of two from the northern city of Tabriz, one of many areas where explosions were reported.
“What is going to happen to my children?” she said, crying as she spoke by phone.
US President Donald Trump said the operation would end a security threat to the United States and offer Iranians a chance to topple their rulers. The Pentagon said that US strikes against Iran were named “OPERATION EPIC FURY.”
An Iranian from the central city of Yazd said he hoped the attack would topple the clerical establishment that has run the country since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. “Let them bomb,” the resident of Yazd said.
Samira Mohebbi, speaking from the northern city of Rasht, disagreed.
“I am against this regime, to hell with them. But I don’t want my country to be attacked by foreign forces, I don’t want my Iran to turn into Iraq,” she said, referring to the neighboring country that suffered years of chaos and bloodshed following the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
‘THEY FOOLED US AGAIN’
Security forces blocked roads in the area of Tehran that is home to the offices of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, President Masoud Pezeshkian and parliament, witnesses said.
The latest round of negotiations between the United States and Iran in Geneva on Thursday failed to secure a breakthrough over Tehran’s nuclear programme, though Omani mediators reported progress.
“They said the nuclear talks are going well. They fooled us again,” said a resident of Tehran.
Zohreh, 28, said she would leave the port city of Bushehr with her three-year-old daughter and go to her parents’ home in a village in northern Iran.
“Why are we paying this price? I want my daughter to grow up safe and in peace,” she said.
Western governments have long suspected Iran aims to build a nuclear bomb. Tehran has always denied this.
Witnesses said people were rushing to buy hard currency.
In Isfahan, another area where attacks were reported, some said they were unable to withdraw cash from ATMs.
Reza Saadati, 45, said he was taking his family to the city of Urumieh near the Turkish border. “If the border is open, we will cross and then fly to Istanbul,” he said.
Mohammad Esmaili, 63, speaking from the town of Ilam, some 500 km (300 miles) from Tehran, said he would leave the town with his family. “God knows what will happen to us. Pray for us,” he said.
“People are shocked, scared. What is going to happen to us? Save us please,” said a woman from Tehran.